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Spaceplan is the perfect game to leave on a browser tab at work

Spaceplan is the perfect game to leave on a browser tab at work

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Click for potato

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It’s Friday afternoon in August. Some inexplicably over-productive colleague has scheduled you to join a meeting you don’t really need to be in. You need to pay attention, but if you took 10 seconds here or two minutes there to zone out, that would be okay. You, my friend, should put SPACEPLAN in a browser tab right now.

It is, as Andy Baio describes, it, a "clicker game." That means that you will do precisely one thing most of the time: click a mouse button. But as you do, a game mechanic involving building up energy through the magic of potatoes will emerge. And so too will a story that’s surprisingly deep emerge, thanks in large part to a mouthy ship-board computer. The goal of all this clicking and waiting is, well, actually half the fun of the game is discovering what the goal is, so I won't spoil it for you.

It’s perfect for work because once you get past the initial clicking phase, the game can run on its own for a bit. You can check out for awhile and do, you know, real actual work. Click back over to the tab every now and then to check in on your spacefaring potato mission. It’s a game that only requires a tenth of your attention for a few hours, but nevertheless rewards you for it.

Now get (most of) your attention back on that meeting. It’s very important that you learn how to properly format those TPS reports. And when you're done with both SPACEPLAN and those reports, there's always Candy Box to go back to.